Shafaat and Kenley in 2015 identified the opportunity to improve System Engineering Standards by incorporating the design principle of learning. The System Level Assessment (SLA) Methodology is an approach that fulfills this need by efficiently capturing the learnings of a team of subject matter experts in the early stages of product system design. By gathering expertise, design considerations are identified that when used with market and business requirements improve the overall quality of the product system. To evaluate the effectiveness of this approach, the methodology has been successfully applied over 400 times within each realm of the New Product Introduction process, including most recently to a Technology Development program (in the earliest stages of the design process) to assess the viability of various electrification technologies under consideration by an automotive Tier 1 supplier. The SLA-derived approach taken on this program showed the potential to reduce the level of redesign work, migrating the design ownership to a system-level, while significantly increasing the number of invention disclosures compared to an equivalent technology developed using traditional methods. Using the SLA method yielded 170% more invention disclosures, of which more than 40% were converted to patent filings.
